Just when you thought that sanity was about to be restored.........
In the Observer today Mike Pitts has a longish article in which he shovels praise onto the authors of the new Altar Stone study published in "Nature" magazine. It's all very similar to the stuff contained in hundreds (thousands?) of other articles published in the media over the past few days.
Anyway, he says that so surprising was the "discovery" of the Altar Stone - Orcadia link that he needed to check with "geological colleagues" on the science involved. Was it really reliable? Yes indeed, he was assured, it's all good science.
"And who were these wise geological colleagues?" I hear you cry.......
Well, it so happens that they are the very same geologists who wrote the article.
You couldn't make it up............
Reading Mike's blog this morning first thing put a smile on my face, but the Observer article reaches heights of absurdity I would not have thought possible even for this branch of British Academia. Please read it through to the very end and the hilarious vision of jolly tribes of British Nationalists progressing overland from feast to feast carrying several tons of boring old sandstone.
ReplyDeleteMike did succeed to alert me to an as yet unremarked coincidence, The Picnic Table discovered by MPP at his Rhosyfelin Quarry bears an uncanny resemblance to the so-called Altar Stone. What a revelation! The Altar Stone is in fact not an Altar but a Picnic Table!
No wonder the Scots left their Picnic Table behind at Stonehenge - a gift perhaps? It must have been tiring lugging it all the way down from Orkney.
Maybe they didn't like the ham sandwiches they got from the caterers down on Salisbury Plain, and went back home in a huff, longing for Aberdeen kippers?
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